From New Deal to New Hard Times, Eleanor Endures

Friday

Dec 25, 2009 at 4:18 AM

For the town of Eleanor, which took its name from the first lady of the New Deal, government action still works.

DAN BARRY

ELEANOR, W.Va.

Early spring, in the Depression year of 1935. A poor girl from coal-mine country, a dark-haired girl of 4, rocks beside her mother and two sisters in a car moving through the rain-swept night. Soon they will join her father, a Great War veteran who pads his shoes with cardboard. He has been working for months on some distant government relief project.

When the car finally stops, the sleepy girl can see only a blur of mud and midnight. Not until morning does she take in this government project: a new American town, raised from a field by her father and other men with families caught in the stalled gears of a broken economy.

The girl is told: You’re home now, Marlane.

Late fall, in the Recession year of 2009. A dark-haired woman of 78 drives her Buick, a Rendezvous, slowly through the town she has always called home. “This is an Eleanor house, and this is an Eleanor house,” Marlane Crockett Carr says, nodding toward oversize bungalows distinguished by the original pitched roofs. “And this, and this...”

The economic fallout of this annus horribilis, now drawing to a close, continues: 10 percent unemployment ; tens of millions without steady access to adequate food; wholesale industry shakeouts. It takes the collective American mind to another time, an even harder time, when federal stimulus programs meant more than just bridge repairs and weatherization; when the government jump-started the economy by building highways, schools, post offices — entire towns.

Dozens of New Deal “resettlement” communities dotted the country: the Penderlea Homestead Farms in North Carolina; the Phoenix Homesteads in Arizona; the Dyess Colony in Arkansas, where Johnny Cash grew up. And here: on fertile West Virginia land beside the Kanawha River, a community named after Eleanor Roosevelt, First Lady of the New Deal.

Over the years, these New Deal towns have been praised as a sound response to paralyzing poverty and criticized as flawed, communism-tinted social experiments. But in this hard time, as half-built subdivisions stand as ghostly testaments to economic failure, a place like Eleanor reflects a government action that worked, and works.

Ms. Carr watched Eleanor grow, from a place planted in mud nearly 75 years ago — well before the Levittowns of post-World War II America — to a town that proclaims itself the cleanest in West Virginia; a town with a budget, a mayor, a library, a Dairy Queen. Its development has been bitter, sweet, messy, quiet, ugly and beautiful, not unlike the evolution of this country.

Driving her Rendezvous down roads intimately known, Ms. Carr says she fears that Eleanor’s history is being pushed aside, that someday people will not know why the main street is called Roosevelt Boulevard, or even why the town is called Eleanor.

Then again, she says, maybe these are the protective fears of a woman who remembers how a dark-haired girl of 4 christened her new home long ago: by flushing the toilet in wondrous discovery, over and over, like a child of Steinbeck.

“Your eyes,” she says, “look at some things through your heart.”

‘Eventual Self-Support’

In the desperate year of 1934, word spread through West Virginia’s relief offices of another federal “subsistence homesteading” project. It would be similar to Arthurdale, a community recently created outside Morgantown for displaced mining families, many of whom had been living in shacks beside open sewers.

Detractors ridiculed Arthurdale as a wrong-headed and expensive pet project for President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s activist wife. But as Blanche Wiesen Cook noted in her authoritative biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, the first lady had seen first-hand the scrawny children, eating scraps hardly worth a dog’s time. She held her ground.

More than 1,000 families applied to live in this new homestead called Red House Farms, about 30 miles west of Charleston, on property once owned by George Washington. After a vetting process to identify the physically and morally strong, just 150 were accepted, including the family of Robert Crockett, who had lost his job loading coal cars in Boone County. A military veteran with three children, the youngest named Marlane, he was lucky enough to be chosen with dozens of other men on relief to build and live in the settlement.

Seventy-five years ago this month, Mrs. Roosevelt visited the nearly completed homestead with her good friend, the former journalist Lorena Hickok, whose cross-country reports as a kind of government scout had greatly influenced the first lady. “From long deprivation the health of the people is beginning to break down,” Ms. Hickok had written. “Some of them have been starving for eight years. I was told there are children in West Virginia who have never tasted milk!”

Four months later, the Crocketts and dozens of other families moved into this community of opportunity, designed for “eventual self-support”: 150 homes on one-acre lots, each slightly different, each with a chicken coop, a small garden and that most exotic amenity, indoor plumbing. There was a hosiery factory in the works, a dairy farm, a canning operation, a grocery store, even a pool hall. (Something it did not have: black residents.)

The families paid a modest rent to the government that could be applied to the purchase price. The government expected them to work, grow vegetables, learn home economics and engage in cultural pursuits, like joining the band. Their children were to keep clean, stay in school and take cod liver oil to ward against rickets.

If a family did not meet these expectations, it faced “house notice” — public scolding that could lead to eviction.

Not everything was idyllic. During another visit, Ms. Hickok heard complaints about cracks in the cinderblock walls, inadequate closet space, and a government that saw people as statistics. Mostly, the residents worried about finding employment beyond the homestead. A few, like Robert Crockett, worked for the community, in the dairy one day, on the farm the next.

Save for the cod liver oil, the girl named Marlane loved it all. Picking up mail from the kitchen table of the postmistress. Snapping beans with her mother to prepare them for canning. Receiving a doll with a pink bonnet from Santa, who made his rounds a few days before the first Christmas, in a government truck.

The first in the community to die was a little boy who had been struck in the head with a rock; the townspeople followed his light-colored coffin up a hill, where he was buried by the water tank. The first to be buried in the new cemetery, under some beech trees, was a woman who had cut herself while canning. Little Marlane liked to place dandelions on the sole tombstone; she would tell her mother the cemetery was so pretty that she hoped others would die.

The town called Red House Farms soon changed its name to Eleanor, after the tall, approachable first lady. During one of her visits, she gave a pack of Doublemint gum to a girl named Dymple Cockrell. “I thought I was the richest girl in town,” recalls Ms. Cockrell, now 83 and living in the same homesteading house she moved into at the age of 8. “I shared it, of course.”

Sidewalks and Memories

The Depression seeped into World War II. Three soldiers from Eleanor were killed and buried overseas. The community building called the Big Store burned down. After the war, the government got out of the controversial homesteading business, and essentially sold Eleanor to a corporation of its elders for $250,000.

One day Marlane jokingly told a friend she was going to marry that handsome sailor down the street. Two years later she did, eloping with Sandy Carr in 1947, when he was 21 and she was 16. Her father cried and said, You’re going back and finishing high school. She did this, too.

Eleanor slowly evolved. Some residents complained that others had taken advantage, selling off property that had always been considered communal. One morning the town awoke to find on every doorstep an anonymous six-page letter that criticized various inside deals and concluded with several plaintive questions, including:

Why is hot-rodding allowed in Eleanor?

Marlane and Sandy, a high school teacher and coach, lived for a while above a chicken-and-gravy-style restaurant on Roosevelt Boulevard, then rented one of the original homes for about $25 a month. Finally, they built a house on the back end of his mother’s property. They had three children: Sandra, Michael, and the baby, Rebekah, born with a congenital heart defect.

The communal dairy barn burned. The canning operation disappeared. Marlane’s beloved Rebekah died in her arms on the first day of classes, right there in the George Washington Middle School. Just 13, she was buried in the cemetery where her mother once laid dandelions on a solitary tombstone.

To honor her daughter’s memory, Marlane returned to school and became a surgical technician. All the while, little by little, Eleanor was changing: sidewalks, street lights, a community swimming pool. A Fruth’s Pharmacy where the old Big Store once stood. Even a small shopping center at the end of town.

Sensing time’s fast passage, Marlane and others saw the need to celebrate Eleanor’s history while some homesteaders were still alive. She helped to organize a 60th anniversary party, and a 65th, and a 70th. She began visiting classrooms, usually around Oct. 11 — Eleanor Roosevelt’s birthday — and talked about the disagreements over the worth of these New Deal communities, the lingering stigma of having been called welfare recipients, and the unabashed love she had for Eleanor.

She also served for a decade as a maverick member of the Town Council, one day unveiling another plan to beautify the town, and the next day tweaking the good old boys by questioning the large expenditures of the tiny police department. One thing about Marlane: she spoke her mind.

The Rub of Time

Eleanor government got ugly. In 1998, the police chief and two officers accused Marlane of sexual harassment, saying she had walked into their office, raised her shirt and exposed herself. She was 67, and the kind of woman who refused to wear shorts in public. The charge was nonsense, she says: clear retaliation.

But the accusations became fodder for national late-night talk shows; Marlane wanted to hide. When she and her husband reluctantly drove up to the next council meeting, the Town Hall parking lot was packed with cars and television news trucks. She told Sandy she couldn’t go in.

In the years to come, the state’s Human Rights Commission would find no merit to the harassment charges. The entire police force would be dismissed, amid findings of excessive pay raises and overtime. And Marlane would feel the democratic sting of being voted out of office.

But on this night, Sandy insisted that Marlane walk into that meeting. And when she did, townspeople embraced this daughter of Eleanor with shouts of support.

Marlane Crockett Carr ends her Rendezvous drive through the evolving American town of Eleanor. Its population has grown to 1,500 — a number that includes nearly 20 original homesteaders, like Marlane. Its $500,000 budget pays the salaries of a handful of employees who work in Town Hall, clean the streets, police the town. And unemployment in the county is below the national average, thanks in part to a Toyota plant and a large auto parts manufacturer, Diamond Electric.

Over all, things are good. When a business moves out, another usually moves in. When the town needed a library, students in the vocational school — based in the old hosiery factory building — did much of the labor, which helped to keep costs way down.

Still, Marlane senses the history of Eleanor being worn away by the rub of time. Original houses were knocked down for a bank, a credit union, a Rite Aid. A relative demolished the house Marlane grew up in to clear space for a more modern home.

A few months ago, town officials held a 75th anniversary celebration, even though it was only the 74th. Marlane’s offer to give a historical talk was ignored, so she stayed home. In her darker moments, she wonders whether homesteaders like her parents are still seen as welfare recipients, unworthy of celebration.

But when she thinks of the struggles of Robert and Eva Crockett, both buried now in the cemetery, close to Rebekah, her eyes blur with tears. “They had come from nothing,” she says. “They were told by Eleanor Roosevelt that it would be wonderful — and it was.”

As for that little dark-haired girl, Marlane says: “I was so appreciative. I always loved knowing that I lived on George Washington’s land.”

Across from Town Hall, where portraits of Eleanor Roosevelt lie on the floor of a deserted room that is supposed to be a museum someday, the schools let out. As he does most afternoons, the police chief has parked his cruiser facing the Dairy Queen, in plain sight.

Its presence announces: Slow down for the children of Eleanor.

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